June 2008

June 25, 2008

Ainsley Hayes: I'll ask again: for what purpose was I brought here today? Leo McGarry: So I could offer you a job. Ainsley Hayes: I'm asking because I do not think that it is fair that I be expected to play the role of the mouse to the White House's cat in the game of... you know the game? Leo McGarry: Cat and mouse? Ainsley Hayes: Yes.

—The West Wing, "In This White House" (10/25/00)

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All good things must come to an end, and so it was for my brother and my sister in law. The other night I went to the AirTran website and printed out their boarding passes. I also checked to see if their flight was running on time, which it was. So we got them packed into the car and off we went to Baltimore Washingtom International Thurgood Marshall Airport.

And what the hell kind of name is that for an airport? If my brother followed the sign from the beginning he'd be home by the time he got to the end of it. It must take gallons of paint just to touch up that sonofabitch.

ANYway.

We get to the airport and while we're waiting to check their bag, we notice the Departures board. And just like that, their 7:55 flight is delayed to 9:09. Well...at least they don't have to worry if the line slows down. But it's still only about 6:15. We get the bag checked and my brother decides that he's hungry, so we start looking around for a place to eat. This is easier than it used to be at BWITMA because they've FINALLY put in places on this side of the security checkpoint. We decided to stop in at the Bill Bateman's Bistro.

Our initial greeting wasn't the warmest, but I marked that down to the fact that this woman suddenly had three parties to seat at once. For all that, it wasn't especially busy in there.

By now, you probably realize that I don't write stories that begin with "We went to a restaurant" and end with "and it was delicious!" What you're waiting for is the next part, where something goes wrong and I wind up writing to the Customer Service department. So I'll let my email to them tell some of this. I used their "Online Comment Card" so they already have the date, time and location:

While waiting for a delayed flight, I stopped in with my brother and sister-in-law for something to eat. The waiter was friendly and efficient and we have no complaints there.

Shortly after we started eating, we noticed two gentlemen at a table nearby looking at something. It turned out that they were watching a mouse scampering around their immediate area. As we looked around, we realized that there were actually several mice running around the dining area where we were sitting. We counted at least five individual animals. We asked to speak to the manager and she was reportedly nowhere to be found. We told the waiter that we were leaving and would not be paying for our meal, although we did tip him for his efforts. He commented that he didn't really blame us, although his overall attitude appeared to be more as though he was resigned to the situation rather than surprised or upset by it. This, in effect, was my brother's last impression of the Baltimore area: a delayed flight and a rodent-infested restaurant.

It was actually a little worse than this. My brother got really upset and started swearing, telling the waiter that his appetite had been "frigged up" (yeah, I don't know either) and that "I'm not gonna eat this fuckin' shit. I'll give you [the waiter] some money, because you did your job. But I'm not paying for this shit." By "nowhere to be found" I meant that the manager, we soon learned, left the restaurant and nobody knew where she was headed. Back to my note:

I realize that airport restaurants don't necessarily depend on a lot of repeat customers (who, by definition, are transient) and therefore probably don't feel required to care about the people who pass through. However, this is a small, local chain which presumably still has relatively centralized control. Therefore, as someone who lives in the area, I'm inclined to generalize my experience to the other restaurants in the chain, and I'm going to have a very hard time returning, or recommending Bill Bateman's to anyone.

Yeah, I know I was baiting them there, a little bit. (Heh. See what I did there?)

I thank you for your attention and, while I'm not begging for an apology or a refund (as I said, we didn't pay for our partially-eaten meal), I would welcome your comments regarding this situation.

I read once that when you write a customer complaint, you should spell out specifically what you want out of your transaction. I didn't really want much other than acknowledgment by this point, especially since the waiter was so blasé and the manager was apparently on the run.

A couple of days later I got a letter from Lee Glowacki, the Area Manager for Bill Bateman's Bistro Corporate Restaurants, via US Mail. The letter was kind of long, so I'm going to cut a little and paraphrase a little.

They noted that the airport location is a franchise and that while they are not directly responsible for this location, "we will do everything possible to see that your concerns with them are handled appropriately." They stressed that all feedback is invaluable, and that "excellent service, outstanding food and drinks, in a clean comfortable restaurant, is what we strive for."

"We are disappointed," Lee wrote, "at our obvious lack of attention to your needs and for the staff giving you the impression we do not care." There was a promise to follow up with the Franchise Owners (capitalization his) concerning my experience. He then assured me that it was their "corporate policy, if there is ever a guest satisfaction issue that the manager on duty should be made aware of the problem, and whenever possible be corrected immediately. Obviously that did not happen with you." He closed the letter with an offer to bring it in to their Glen Burnie location for a $20 credit.

So there was a pretty quick response to the problem, and while it wasn't something the restaurant could have handled immediately as such, that they made the offer despite my telling them that I didn't really want anything other than a response, goes a long way, for me. I don't know that I'm going to pop back into the BWITMA location just to see whether or not they've gotten rid of the rodents, but it was good to get the response, a promise of actual action AND a coupon that basically asks for another chance.

June 21, 2008

Jackson Lucas: [after being revived] I can't see anything! Am I blind? Ned: Good news is you're not blind. Bad news is you're dead. Charlotte 'Chuck' Charles: Makes blind seem like a walk in the park, doesn't it?

—Pushing Daisies, "Pigeon" (10/24/07)

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Yow. A few minutes to breathe, finally. So of course I'm burning them up with the likes of you.

The last few days have been a bit of a whirlwind. Even when I thought it was going to slow down (like it was SUPPOSED to), it didn't.

The Pig Roast was a lot of fun, despite the rain that drove everyone indoors for a little while, but we rallied and had one of my best pigs ever. Unfortunately, dealing with the rain and some of its effects on the party as a whole (notably, getting all the food moved inside) meant that I lost over an hour of mingling and socializing. So if I didn't get to chitchat with you much (or at all), my sincere apologies and I hope you had a good time. Even if I did get to chitchat, I hope you had fun as well, but at least I have a better handle on how your evening went.

Because my brother was in town, he and his wife were using my bedroom. GF was in Wee One's bed (Wee One was with her father), and I was on the sofa. This doesn't bother me specifically, since I tend to fall asleep on the sofa roughly once a week, watching old movies on TCM. It's quite the comfy couch, if you ask me. This season we're using the Idemo Dark Blue slipcover. Anyway.

Sunday morning and the phone is ringing at about 7:15. Amazingly, I'm not hung over, but I did get to bed pretty late and I'm just a bit too groggy to get to it in time. A half-hour later there's a knock on the door. I answer it and it's GF's parents. Her father asks me, "You know why we're here, right?"

It takes a second and then the light goes on. His mother, GF's grandmother, has died.

This wasn't entirely unexpected, but you still don't like to hear it. For that matter, I'm sure they didn't enjoy saying it, either. GF was very close to her grandmother, so this was naturally a huge blow to her. The three of them left right away.

Now, our plans for the day involved going to Washington DC to see some extremely historical objects and some very Federal buildings. This was pretty much up in the air now. GF called a couple of hours later telling us to go to DC anyway, without her.

Our DC tour was rather whirlwind, but we saw a lot of stuff, considering. The Museum of American History is still closed for renovations, so my plan to follow up on Friday's theme was shot to hell, since I couldn't show them the original Star-Spangled Banner. But we spent some time cruising around the Capitol Hill area, then we stopped in the Natural History museum. We had lunch in the Atrium Cafe (I highly recommend the burrito). Then we walked past the Washington Monument to the World War II memorial. I'd never seen that before so it was new to all of us. From there we walked along the Reflecting Pool to the Lincoln Memorial. Up the other side of the Reflecting Pool to the Vietnam Memorial. I felt badly about passing up the Korea memorial but time was getting to be a factor for us. By the time we got back home, darkness had about fallen and GF had made all the necessary plans with her father. She still had some details to hammer out on Monday, so we still wouldn't see much of her then.

Monday was my brother's last day in town, so I set up another quickie tour of the city, starting with breakfast from the Fractured Prune. They were on the South Beach diet when the came up; now I'm not so sure anymore. It may have morped into the South Park Diet.

Our tour started in Hampden, since my brother wanted to see "something funky". The first thing I thought of was the flamingo in front of the Cafe Hon. We cruised the neighborhood a little bit and I pointed out a few details. (Try explaining the Miracle on 34th Street to someone when it's 80 degrees out.) From there we went down Falls Road to get into the downtown area. This is a great way to go if you're touring people around, since you spend so much time on a road that does NOT allow you to believe that you're so deeply within city limits. We stopped for lunch at Lexington Market, which is only "World Famous" on the signs out front. My brother had a sausage from Polock Johnny's, which he liked enough that I now have to bring a box of them down next time I visit.

From Lexington we headed past the Inner Harbor (since we'd already seen it), cruised through Little Italy and stopped in Fells Point for a bit. We poked though the stores and stopped into Maggie Moo's for some ice cream cones (yeah yeah, I know, Vaccaro's, but my S-I-L was insistent on this one: Waffle cone, butter pecan). MM's has ice cream that's flavored just like Twizzlers, by the way. My curiosity got the better of me and I had a taste. For what it's worth, it does taste just like Twizzlers, which is why I'd never get an entire cone full of the stuff. We also spent some time in Sound Garden, where I bought a T-Shirt, since I'd had a minor ice cream mishap, and at Ten Thousand Villages, where I picked up a couple of baubles. More on those in a near-future post.

Back in the car and we cruised through Highlandtown and grabbed I-95 to get home. On the way I stopped at a supermarket and picked up some fixin's to make crab cakes. May I say I did a fine job, especially for a non-native.

And then it was to the airport, but there's a new story in that and this post has been in draft for far too long.

June 18, 2008

Rose: I had the strangest dream last night. I was at a baseball game. Charlie Brown was pitching, Shroeder was behind the plate, Lucy and Snoopy were in center field, and they wouldn't let me play. When I woke up, I was crying. What do you think it is? Dorothy: Peanuts envy?

—The Golden Girls, "Cheaters" (3/23/90)

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My brother was in town this past weekend. He's only been here once before and we didn't get a lot of visiting time then, so he and I were both determined that he get a pretty good look at the Baltimore area.

We had tickets to the Orioles game on Friday, so we originally planned to hang around the harbor all afternoon. I realized, however, that even for a tourist that gets old quickly, so after emerging from the tunnel and jumping out onto Key Highway, our first stop was at Fort McHenry. We didn't go into the fort itself, but they got to hear the story of how Francis Scott Key was out in the harbor and saw that our flag was still there and was inspired to write "This Land is Your Land" as sung by drunken Brits. Or some such. He got a story, anyway, and was duly impressed.

From there we went down to Nick's Fish House in Port Covington for a bite to eat. GF and I basically had the same thing, except mine involved bread. S-I-L had a soft shell crab sandwich, and I say More Power To Her, since I'll pick a crab but I don't know about those soft shell jobbies. My brother, ever the brave one when it came to seafood, ordered a steak. I presume that this is the reason that we had to wait so long for our food, since in my experience they're not usually that slow. My guess is, they had to send someone out to the Safeway to get the steak. We ate on their outdoor deck and enjoyed the view and the breeze and such.

Our next stop was (finally) the Inner Harbor. We parked in that ground-level lot across the street and strolled the promenade from the Visitor Center to the Aquarium. On the way back we strolled through some of the shops so we could use the rest rooms and get something to drink. From there we walked up Conway Street to the stadium.

Our seats were in Section 47, which are pretty good seats although were were apparently in Pittsburgh Pirate Country that night. Had a few more Orioles fans shown up in our section, it might have been a little more endurable, especially since the first three innings of the game were nothing short of excruciating. By the end of three innings, the Pirates were ahead, 6-1. This game, by the way, was the first time the O's have played Pittsburgh since the 1979 World Series. Anyway, the O's woke up in the fourth inning and went on to win the game, 9-6. So it was pretty exciting all around. And, as we left the stadium, we were treated to a fireworks show that went for 15-20 minutes after the game. We stood on Conway Street and basked in the lights and the noise before heading back to the car.

So, quite coincidentally, my brother and his wife started their tour of Baltimore with the Rocket's Red Glare and Bombs Bursting in Air, and ended it the same way. Cool.

Fogle is the leader of a team of state managers who were hired (at BCPSS expense, of course) to oversee special education in Baltimore City. Frankly, they were so far removed from the trenches that I'd be amazed if they had any idea what was actually going on in the schools themselves, "Learning Walks" notwithstanding.

There are two quotes in the article that struck me as a little odd. Here's the first (emphasis is mine):

Still, Fogle has some concerns about the implementation of Alonso's plan to decentralize school management and give more power to principals. He said the system has given principals high-quality training in their new responsibilities, but he's concerned about the amount of information they had to take in. "You can't put a gallon and a half in a gallon jug," he said.

Excuse me? Did he just say that the principals in Baltimore City are stupid? I think he did.

The other quote comes from Dr. Alonso, who notes that when he comes to special education, "We need to change how we do business in this area perhaps more than in any other, because the children are most vulnerable and some of the outcomes most recalcitrant."

Recalcitrant? Really? I'm not sure that word means what he thinks it does, since applying that word to outcomes rather anthropomorphizes them. In the end, though, I don't think it's appropriate to cite work problems as being resistant to authority.

There's also a dreadful metaphor about the Statue of Liberty, but i'll let it slide for now.

June 09, 2008

[Pee-wee is offering a $10,000 reward to whoever finds his bike] Dottie: Pee-wee, how are you ever going to pay a reward like that? Pee-wee: It's simple. Whoever returns the bike is obviously the person who stole it. So they don't deserve any reward!

—Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (1985)

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This morning I had an electrician to the house to finally take out the old fuses and put in circuit breakers. As a result of this, the power was out in the house. The good news is that we're in the 21st century around here, so I have a cell phone with unlimited weekend minutes.

So I'm on the cell phone with my mother and as we're chitchatting, I look out my back window. Across the alley out back I see someone in my garage. At first, I thought it was B from next door, but as the guy steps out I realize it's not him. Some guy is taking stuff out of my garage!

He's a thin, older white man; appears to be in his sixties, unless time hasn't been especially kind to him. He's balding on top and has a salt & pepper fringe around the sides and back. He's wearing a white tank top, jeans and dirty work boots. He's got a bit of a limp, but behaves as though he's had it forever and has adapted to it by now.

Still chatting with mom, I step outside and start crossing the yard. Finally I get to the gate, ask my mother to hold and say to the guy, "Excuse me, where are you going with that?"

He tells me that he's taking it up to the corner, the guy in the black truck told him to take it to the corner. I tell him he's got the wrong garage. The guy insists: "He told me he'd give me $15 to bring this stuff up there." I say, "This is my garage. You need to put that stuff back, now." Finally I remember my mother and tell her there's someone stealing stuff from my garage and I have to call her back. I immediately dial 911. By now, of course, the guy is taking off, of course. The 911 operator is asking me all kinds of questions that the cops are going to ask anyway, so it's not like I'm able to run this guy down and talk to her at the same time. I'm walking with the phone in my hand up after him toward Harford Road (my place is a few doors down from Harford), but by the time I get there he's nowhere to be seen.

Then I get the bad feeling that this wasn't his first trip into the garage. I open the door and discover that I'm unfortunately right. The lawn mower is gone, my new bike is gone, a few other items are missing. Son of a bitch.

Despite calling in what is bascially a B&E in progress, the police take over a half-hour to get to the house. I go through the description again, catalog what's missing and so forth. While we're waiting for the report number to come back from the precinct, the officer gets a call that they may have caught the guy, and would I be willing to go identify the guy? Why, yes. Yes, I would.

So I get into the back of the police car and we ride away a few blocks and sure enough, it's the same fossilized piece of shit I saw outside the garage. Different shirt but the same guy. Now I have to go down to the police station and make a statement for the detective, which basically involves telling the entire story yet again. By now I've got it pretty solidly nailed.

Back to the house and the electrician is still working on the breaker box. There was a little hassle because he used to live in this neighborhood and he was pretty sure that our stove was gas, which unfShortly after he left, though, we discovered a problem with the power upstairs. I called him up and he came back and worked at the problem for a couple of hours. He's kind of baffled by what the specific problem might be, which is probably rooted in the fact that the wiring in this house was probably installed by Thomas Edison. Only time will tell, as they say.

So the bottom line is that my stuff is still gone at this point, but really, it's just STUFF, ya know? Although my yard is starting to look like a wheat field, so I guess I'm buying another lawn mower Monday evening.

UPDATE 6/9/08: They've finally caught on to their omission. I'm not saying that's because they saw something here, but I have no reason to think it isn't, so I'm just going to go ahead and take credit for it.

Although he was well-known among the Horsey Set in Maryland (He's the founder of Maryland Million Day), Jim McKay was perhaps best known for two things: host of ABC's Wide World of Sports and his coverage of twelve Olympic games. Most people joke that they usually tuned in to see the "agony of defeat" guy fall off the ski ramp, but the fact remains that in the days before there were eight thousand versions of ESPN and its like available, Wide World of Sports was the one place that people had to see athletic competitions that weren't local, weren't championship games and were unlikely to get any television coverage at all. You could argue (much as you do for ESPN nowadays) that the "sports" aspect of some of these events might be a little thin (Lumberjacking? Chess?), but the show's inclusiveness was part of its greatness.

McKay also distinguished himself by being television's point man during the Munich Olympic Games in the summer 1972. I remember this well because the Winter Games, in Sapporo, Japan, took place around the time of my birthday. My friend came to the house for a sleepover and my father put a TV in the bedroom so that we could stay up late and watch the games. As a result I had a lot of interest in the Olympics when the Summer Games came around.

About midway through the events, on September 5, Palestinian terrorists took 11 Israeli athletes hostage, demanding the release of prisoners in Israeli and Geman jails. 18 hours and an aborted rescue attempt later, it was over and the entire Israeli team was dead. That particular Olympics should have been marked by the athletic triumphs of Olga Korbut and Mark Spitz. It's unfortunate, but instead we usually remember it with the footage of McKay ending the drama:

"When I was a kid my father used to say our greatest hopes and our worst fears are seldom realized. Our worst fears have been realized tonight. They have now said there were eleven hostages; two were killed in their rooms yesterday morning, nine were killed at the airport tonight. They're all gone."

But even McKay, who thought that the subsequent 34-hour stoppage of the Games was a bit short, recognized that even though the Olympics, and sports in general, lost their innocence that day, he also saw that when you're out there Spanning the Globe, it's not just about Munich. And he helped us get back on track as the Games, and our lives, resumed.

June 04, 2008

The Doctor: [while giving Janeway a quite vigorous massage] You work absurdly long hours under constant stress, eating on the run without sufficient exercise or rest. Your body is crying out for mercy.Captain Janeway: [with a painful expression] It certainly is now.

—Star Trek: Voyager, "Scientific Method" (10/29/97)

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GF and I are both having a rather stressful week, each of us for different reasons. It's making us get all snappy at each other and that's never good. What's bugging me is that it's making me less able to compartmentalize myself, which is bad enough because it's been necessary for me to take work home lately. And I really dislike having to do that, but sometimes it can't be avoided. But when I'm carrying home work-related stuff along with the work itself, that's not a good situation.

There's a lot of work that will go into putting our Pig Roast together (on top of everything else we're dealing with), but that day will be fun, and we're certainly looking forward to the days off that will follow. Personally I'm hoping to set myself up with just one day where I get absolutely nothing done, before I have to return to work for the summer session.

And now, back to work. It's a little after midnight but I think I'll be done by 1:00.

June 02, 2008

The Penguin: [while being bombarded by food] Why is there always someone who brings eggs and tomatoes to a speech?

—Batman Returns (1992)

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Daughter is wrapping up her Junior year. She did respectably on her SAT this year but plans to take it again and see if she can't improve her score, she took the AP exam in English and she's in the home stretch for finals and Regents exams. (New York high schools have the regular final exam that the school issues, and the Regents exam, which the state issues. You don't have to pass the Regents to get a diploma--at least, you didn't have to before No Child Left Behind was passed--but having the Regents diploma is a step higher than your standard-issue diploma.)

I got in touch with her a couple of days ago to see if I could arrange for her to be down the weekend of the 14th, since my brother is coming up from Florida and all. She told me that she'd still be in school at that point, plus she got a job.

To which I replied, "Well, if you can afford to miss a day from school, or maybe we couldddddDDDDUUUUUUHHHWWWWHHHAAAT?"

Yes indeed. My daughter has gone over into the Land of Taxpaying CItizens. She's working as a cashier in a local fruit & vegetable market; one I rather liked shopping at when I lived up that way, although I haven't taken the time to pop in when I visit lately. (At left is a photo of the place when it was on fire back in 2002. I'm pretty sure they've cleaned up a little by now.) So between that, and the fact that she's likely to be taking Driver's Ed this summer, I don't know that I'm going to see a lot of her in the near future unless I take the time to visit Long Island and spend a few days up there.

Yellojkt is the lucky one because he gets to watch a lot of this stuff up close and personal (plus it makes good blog fodder). Me, I'm a sideline viewer who has to get it when it's not exactly breaking news, and it's 200 miles away. I think this is one of the reasons it gets to me so much when The Sperm Donor Wee One's father pulls the kind of stunt he did last weekend. He doesn't live that far away; consequently he's pretty much squandering his kid's childhood. Early on, I was one of his biggest supporters and I tried to give GF the other side of the story, from the noncustodial parent perspective. But whatever I did, didn't seem to help any and it's pretty irritating that he wastes these opportunities to be with her.

I should make it clear that I do actually buy his story about last weekend. But it also seems to me that something--anything--happens, and he gives up too quickly. A weird noise in the car and the wind blowing the wrong way are equivalent in his head. And his judgment isn't the best, as evidenced by the time he wrapped up a visit a little early. They got to the house before we did, so he simply left Wee One on the doorstep with nobody at home. At least she had sense enough to go to the neighbor's and ask if she could stay there till we got in. Imagine our surprise when, as we returned from dinner, we passed her playing on the sidewalk a few doors down from the house.

Sometimes my frustration with this tomfoolery leaks through. One time Wee One called me on it, asking me "You don't like my dad, do you?" I replied, "I like him fine, but sometimes I don't respect him very much." Not the kindest thing to say but there's only so far you can go when you're whitewashing the truth.

If there's a theme emerging from the posts so far this week, that's merely coincidental. I think.

June 01, 2008

Mutt Williams: You know, for an old man you ain't bad in a fight. What are you, like 80?

—Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

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Wee One was invited to a birthday party this weekend. It was a big deal kind of event, where there were plans to go to some place in Pennsylvania and spend the night, and there would be swimming and all kinds of revelry for eight-year-olds. Not the kind of party I'd throw for kids, but it sounded like fun.

The bad news was, it was scheduled for this weekend, which is her weekend to be with The Sperm Donor her father. He wasn't going to waste any time going to Pennsylvania (he would have been welcome to come along), and that was the end of that. To make up for it, he got them a pair of tickets to the Orioles game scheduled for today. So they'd do whatever they were going to do Saturday night, spend Sunday at the ballpark and have a reasonably pleasant weekend, even if the party wasn't part of it.

He called on Saturday afternoon around noon to say that he was about to leave. We needed to go visit with GF's grandmother (who recently transferred to a nursing home from the congregate housing she was in previously), so we arranged to meet him there. Since his mother lives in the same complex, and it cuts his travel time by about a half hour, it's good all around. Wee One packed a set of clothes for the game, her Nintendo DS (naturally), and a couple of other doodads that almost-nine-year-olds can't live without.

In the nursing home, GF's phone rang and I answered it. It was SD her father. He was having car trouble. More accurately, he thought he might be having car trouble and decided it wasn't worth the risk. I made some commisserating noises and suggested that he talk to Wee One. I handed over the phone and of course there's all kinds of tears mixed with the almost-not-quite-kinda-sorta-maybe-meaning-it "That's OK"s and such. By now, GF's returned from wherever she'd been, so now we get to pick up the pieces. And how do we do this, you ask? By taking Wee One along on our date night.

Now, we'd pondered going to the May Birthday thing to celebrate with the local blogiverse, even though I'd be a Designated Driver (today's my last day on the Weapons-Grade Antibiotics), but I do have to draw a line with taking a kid into a situation where there's a bunch of grownups drinking, even if it's technically legal for that child to be there. (Pig Roast notwithstanding, ahem.) Plus, she's in third grade, when they start indoctrinating the kids into all that "Drinking is bad, mmmkay?" routine, so now we have a pint-size Carrie Nation on our hands. I hope all you guys had fun, anyway.

Instead, we decided we'd do one of those things I swear not to do: we went to the movies on a Saturday night. Not only did we go to the movies, we went to White Marsh. To see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. That's right. We went to that hellhole (as all movie theaters are on Saturday nights) to see one of the top films in the nation.

Without getting too spoilery, I'll say this: The movie clocks in at about two hours and five minutes, and the first hour and forty minutes are pretty good, It's about what you'd expect from the Indiana Jones franchise, even almost twenty years later, and despite Shia LeBeouf's performance. It's that last 20 minutes or so that gives you a little bit of "...the hell?" It was almost prophetic on my part to buy Reese's Pieces at the snack bar earlier in the evening.

We saw the 8:00 show and by the time we got home, everyone was pretty much ready for bed. And sometimes, that's how Date Night goes.

The Cast

Our former next-door neighbors. Their given names begin with neither S nor B, although the names that everyone calls them do begin with S and B. Go figure.

Wee One

Wife's daughter, who is almost eighteen years old. An artist and aspiring actress who spends an inordinate amount of time getting physical therapy. She'll be starting college in the fall. We'll be in debtor's prison by the spring.

Daughter

My 25-year-old daughter, a college graduate from SUNY New Paltz and working in the world of theater, making props. Currently her work can be seen on the campus of the University of North Carolina in Durham, with the Playmakers.